Take a look at this Portuguese speaking whippersnapper (em português, claro). He watches TV, takes note of all the Portuguese grammar mistakes he hears and writes TV people letters to show them they have been at fault.

Hehehe, I can spend a good hour in the bookstore laughing at those "gems". It's so embarrassing! But hey, without mistakes, we can't learn from them...I guess maybe we'd just like someone a little lower on the totem pole to make the gigantic blunders, though.

I absolutely LOVE languages--- and people and cultures--- but I'm actually here because now, after some time hearing, speaking, and reading other languages, my English is suffering!

Brazilian dude wrote:Which reminds me of the joint meeting they held a couple of weeks ago. If you had taken both's brain, you wouldn't have gotten half of one.

Brazilian dude

One of my favorite cartoon strips was one called Tumbleweeds, about Cowboys, Indians, and the Cavalry in the West. In one panel, the Chief and the Colonel are seen going into a teepee. One Indians asks, "How's the battle of wits going?" The other answers, "Our half is winning."

I steal that line every time I need it!

Regards//Larry

"To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them." -- Attributed to Richard Henry Lee

Brazilian dude wrote:Take a look at this Portuguese speaking whippersnapper (em português, claro). He watches TV, takes note of all the Portuguese grammar mistakes he hears and writes TV people letters to show them they have been at fault.

I like this kind of articles very much! So thanks for forwarding it!! It'll become part of my (modest) collection of similar texts.

What particularly interests me in this kind of texts is the rather limited view of both the journalist and the main character, and how this kind of articles spread on a rather wide scale keep a bunch of prejudices alive, both about language and about linguists/linguistics.
Maybe somebody should tell the journalist that linguistics is not about prescriptive grammar booklets, and tell the "linguista autodidacta" that the grammar of spoken language differs from written language, as anybody who speaks and writes on a regular basis has experienced by his/herself .

Anyone who stops to think about it will notice that our standard reflexive pronouns are not very consistently formed. Some are formed on the genitive case of the pronoun: myself, ourselves, yourself, yourselves. Herself might be considered as genitive as might itself if we allowed for merging of the two s's. But then we have himself and themselves, patently formed on the objective case, and we have to admit that the third person reflexives are just different. Bishop Lowth back in 1762 was aware of the anomaly and opposed himself and themselves as corruuptions. He plumped for his self and their selves instead, citing the first from Sir Philip Sidney and the second from some statues of Henry VI.

But usage paid no attention to the Bishop's plea for a more rational and consistent set of pronouns. Hisself and theirselves still exist, but they are considered nonstandard. You will find them, and theirself, in dialectal speech, in fiction as part of the speech of rustic characters, and occasionally used for humorous effect.

They run off as though Satan hisself was a'ter them with a red-hot ten-pronged pitchfork - Artemus Ward, "Interview with President Lincoln," 1861, in The Mirth of a Nation, ed. Walter Blair & Raven I. McDavid, Jr., 1983